by Ari Shavit
England was good to my ancestors. The British Empire opened its gates to Herbert Bentwich and gave him the rights, liberties, and opportunities that Jews had not had for more than fifteen hundred years. It gave his two sons the best education the West had to offer. In the first quarter of the twentieth century it enabled hundreds of thousands of emancipated Jews to live lives of freedom and dignity under the benevolent Crown. Although these islands, too, were tainted with anti-Semitism, Jews did well in business, science, and even politics. Many of them were part of Britain’s intellectual and meritocratic elites. So more than a hundred years ago, the Bentwich family went on vacations similar to ours. Some summers they spent down in Cornwall, others up in the Lake District. But mostly the Bentwiches would holiday at the family estate of Carmel Court on the Kentish coast. In their Edwardian manor, they lived as the Ramsays lived in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse; the summer holidays of the Bentwich family could have been just like the summer holidays of the Ramsay family. As Timna takes over the kitchen of our rented cottage, and as the children plunge into the reassuring cacophonous merriment of their games, I think about my Anglo-Jewish ancestors, the Bentwiches, and about myself. What would have become of me had my great-grandfather not uprooted us from the green shores of Britain and settled us on that desolate shore of Palestine? What would have been the fate of my mother and myself and my children if Herbert Bentwich had not been overcome by an obsessive yearning for Zion?
I would like to think that I would have been a literature don at Oxford or a producer at the BBC. I would have a nice house in Hampstead and a thatched-roof cottage in West Dorset. My life would be much more relaxed and far safer than my Israeli life. I would have more leisure time for poetry and music. My children’s future would not be under a cloud. But would I have had a richer inner life? Would my life’s experience have been more meaningful?
Demography is vicious. When my great-grandfather enjoyed his time of leisure on the coast of Kent, Jews were 0.8 percent of the British population. Today they are less than 0.5 percent. What makes the demography even more vicious is the fact that in the latter part of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Jews immigrated to Great Britain. Many of them were ultra-Orthodox Jews whose sons and daughters now make up a third of Manchester’s contemporary Jewish community and a fifth of London’s contemporary Jewish community. Less than half of today’s Jews are the descendants of the Anglo Jews of 1920. The disappearance rate of Herbert Bentwich’s Anglo-Jewish community is staggering. In the last one hundred years, most descendants of Britain’s veteran Jews have ceased to be Jewish.
The Anglo-Jewish community of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was remarkable. The union between Jewish talent and British culture produced outstanding poets, writers, playwrights, artists, musicians, scientists, lawyers, bankers, entrepreneurs, politicians, and revolutionaries. Jewish Britons won more than a dozen Nobel Prizes. They created legendary wealth and were prominent in every radical movement that transformed public discourse in the United Kingdom. But this creative community is shrinking fast. Low birthrates and high intermarriage rates are leading to the disappearance of non-Orthodox Jews. There appears to be a gradual loss of interest in Jewish life and Jewish identity in Britain. The descendants of Herbert Bentwich who were born in England in recent years are not Jewish, and those of my wife’s English grandfather are not Jewish, either. Britain still has Rothschilds and Goldsmiths and Millibands, but in a generation or two they, too, will cease to consider themselves Jewish. So as I look out at the gray cliffs of Devon, I know that if my great-grandfather had not removed me from this coast, I myself would probably have been today only half Jewish. Tamara, Michael, and Daniel might not consider themselves Jewish at all. Our private life in Hampstead and Dorset would be full and tranquil, but the collective we belonged to would be vanishing all around us.
Yes, there is America. North America still has a vibrant non-Orthodox Jewish community. In the United States I could have been a proud liberal Jew teaching at Columbia or writing for The New York Times. Like the two of Herbert Bentwich’s daughters who immigrated to America, I could have secured my identity there. But the demography of American Jewry is vicious, too. The numbers are controversial, but roughly speaking, in 1950, 3 percent of Americans were Jews; in 1980 it was 2.4 percent, and in 2010 approximately 2 percent. By 2050 Jews might comprise only a fraction of the population of the United States. The same comfortable circumstances that made the numbers of British non-Orthodox Jews diminish in the last fifty years will likely make the numbers of American non-Orthodox Jews diminish over the next fifty years. In the twenty-first century, the Jewish birthrate in North America is low and the intermarriage rate is high. The Jewish population is aging. More and more of the affiliated Jews are Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox or just old. Most secular young Jews have less interest in Israel or organized religion than their parents have. They are drifting away from the center of gravity of Jewish identity; they are disappearing into the non-Jewish space. Some of Herbert Bentwich’s young American descendants whose parents did not keep Jewish law do not consider themselves to be Jewish anymore. Both in my secular English-Jewish family and in my secular American-Jewish family one can see the end of the line. One can imagine the last of the Jews.
So as I watch Tamara, Michael, and Daniel walk down the path toward the whitewashed fisherman’s cottage that stands in solitude by the sea, I am at odds with myself. One part of me wishes that England would be home for them, that they, too, would live the enchanting life of To the Lighthouse. But I realize that we cannot go down this path. Over the years, our tribe could not survive on these lush green meadows. With no Holocaust and no pogroms and no overt anti-Semitism, these islands kill us softly. Enlightened Europe also kills us softly, as does democratic America. Benign Western civilization destroys non-Orthodox Judaism.
That is why Herbert Bentwich’s insane journey from the shores of Kent to the shores of Jaffa was necessary. For these soft English hills and old English cottages are not for us. This continuous history and solid identity and deep tranquillity are not for us. For we are a people on the move and on the edge. This is why the concentration of non-Orthodox Jews in one place was imperative. And the one place where non-Orthodox Jews could be concentrated was the Land of Israel. So Jaffa was inevitable. We had to save ourselves by building a Jewish national home all around Jaffa.
A few days after I return from Devon, I walk through the ancient port of Jaffa. Once it was an orange-exporting port, then an immigrants’ port, then a fishing port. In recent years it has become a port of leisure. I find a large bar located in an old warehouse and sit there sipping my favorite single malt while watching the handsome young Israelis eat, drink, and make merry. I listen in on the sweet murmurs of Israel’s kinetic nightlife.
Jewish demography in Israel is the mirror image of Jewish demography in the Diaspora. In 1897, approximately 50,000 Jews lived here. Now the Jewish population exceeds six million. While the number of Jews in Britain rose by less than 20 percent and the number of Jews in the United States rose by 350 percent, the number of Jews in Israel rose by more than 10,000 percent.
The contrast between Jewish demographics in the Diaspora and in Israel is astonishing. In 1897, Jews living in Palestine represented only 0.4 percent of world Jewry. In 1950 we accounted for 10.6 percent. In 1980, 25.6 percent. Now we make up almost 45 percent. The historic project that aimed to congregate most of the world’s Jews in the Promised Land has had mind-boggling success. Today, the Jewish community in Israel is one of the two largest in the world. Given current trends, by 2025 the majority of the world’s Jews will be Israelis.
The mass immigration of Jews to the Land of Israel in the twentieth century is Zionism’s greatest triumph. It vindicated the Zionist diagnosis and gave hope to the Zionist prognosis. Zionism’s other triumph was the outstanding fertility rate of the Jewish population in Israel. In 2012, America’s total fertility was 2.06, Britain’s was
1.9, Italy’s was 1.4, and so was Germany’s. By contrast, Israel’s fertility was a staggering 2.65, by far the highest of all OECD countries. While Europe is aging rapidly, Israel is youthful. While the non-Orthodox Jews of the Diaspora are aging, the Jews of Israel are mating and multiplying. While half of Europeans are over forty, half of Israelis are under thirty. They invigorate our towns and cities and invigorate all I see around this bar in the port of Jaffa.
So what has happened in the Holy Land in the first century of Zionism? What was our impact here? Where have we succeeded and where have we failed? To answer this question, I leave the port of Jaffa and embark on a journey following my great-grandfather’s footsteps. Unlike Herbert Bentwich, I don’t stop in Mikveh Israel. From Jaffa I travel to Rishon LeZion through the Tel Aviv satellite towns that were not here in 1897: Holon, Bat Yam, Azur. En route is the absence of the Palestinian villages that were erased since 1897: Tel el-Kabir, Yazur, Bayt Dajan. The freeways have many lanes, the intersections are heavy with traffic. Between what was an orange shipping port and what was the first Jewish colony in Judea, there are no more wildflower fields, no pastures or meadows. There are no camels or flocks of sheep, no nomad Bedouins. Palestine was replaced by a great mass of housing for immigrants, endless ugly housing estates that stretch out to the south and east of Jaffa. The ten-mile route that the Thomas Cook carriages traversed on that spring morning in 1897 are now crammed full of sweaty, bustling cities.
When my great-grandfather reached Rishon LeZion in April 1897, it had approximately one hundred families, fifty houses, thirty stables, and three streets. Zionism’s first colony was surrounded by 4,000 dunams of vineyards in which its farmers planted more than a million high-quality grapevines. The winery was legendary: the largest in the Middle East and one of the most sophisticated worldwide. At the top of the hill stood an impressive synagogue, and along the wide colonial boulevards rose fine colonial houses. The tiny colony founded the first all-Hebrew school in the world and the first all-Hebrew town hall in the world and Palestine’s leading orchestra. Although it was still in its infancy, it was clear that Rishon LeZion had a promising future. As it impressed my great-grandfather in 1897, it impressed Dr. Herzl, who visited a year later. “May it be,” the founder of Zionism wrote in Rishon LeZion, “that from this place will spring forth a blessing for our unfortunate brothers.”
Indeed, from this place a blessing has sprung forth for our unfortunate brothers. From seventy different countries, Jews have fled to Rishon LeZion. The city’s population rose from 500 in 1897 to nearly 250,000 in 2013. The fourth-largest city in Israel now has forty elementary schools, a fast-growing college, a symphony orchestra, and a booming commercial district. In the last twenty-five years alone, the number of its inhabitants rose two and a half times. Seventy-three percent of the local families own the apartments they live in, 74 percent have at least one car, 81 percent have a personal computer, and 96 percent have Internet access. On average, every family in Rishon LeZion has 2.5 mobile phones and more than 2 bedrooms. This middle-class city is also the city of middle Israel: it is neither conservative nor liberal, neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardic, neither religious nor secular. In the 2013 elections, nearly half of its votes went to centrist parties. Rishon LeZion is the typical Jewish Israeli city of the third millennium, inhabited by hardworking immigrants and the children of immigrants who consume a lot and have many children of their own.
From the freeway I turn right to West Rishon. Until 1985 there was nothing here, only the sand dunes Herbert Bentwich saw from a distance in 1897. For nearly a hundred years nothing changed. But in the 1990s the collapse of the Soviet Union brought a million immigrants who had to be settled rapidly. Within a decade the sands were paved over, and within two decades the new West Rishon was larger in size than the old Rishon. At the age of one hundred, Zionism proved to be strong and potent. Once again it performed the miracle of something-from-nothing. Another modern Israeli city was born.
Under the blue skies stand condominium towers that were built quick and huge to answer quick and huge needs. They are efficient and commercial, but they are soulless. The streets look as if they have risen straight off a drafting table. There is a sense of affluence here, but no sense of place.
Like neighboring Rehovot, Rishon LeZion maintained its identity and character for two or three generations. After orange groves replaced the old vineyards, it became a booming citrus colony. But after 1948 came the demographic waves of the 1950s, the 1970s, and the 1990s. The local identity was erased, the unique character obliterated. By now the melting pot was not ideological but economic. And it worked, melding a mishmash of ethnicities and identities and unifying the immigrants under the roof of a gigantic mall.
Ehud Barak once defined the country as a villa in the jungle. But the real Israel is not a villa but a shopping mall: cheap, loud, intense and lively. The shopping mall embodies the Israeli condition—a desperate attempt to lead a pseudo-normal life in abnormal circumstances after an abnormal history and on the verge of an abnormal future. And West Rishon is all about its malls. Consumption is its beating heart.
I walk into Cinema City, a gaudy temple of twenty-six theaters that offer Rishon LeZion the California it wishes to be. Along the corridors stand wax figures of Superman, Batman, Charlie Chaplin, Humphrey Bogart. There is Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, Domino’s pizza, Coca-Cola. Youngsters wearing Diesel jeans and GAP sweatshirts and A&F jackets lug enormous vats of popcorn. Nothing remains of the initial promise of the unique beginning. And yet, seen through the prism of the horrors of the twentieth century, all that surrounds me evokes only sympathy. For Rishon LeZion is a life-saving project. Although it does not look or sound like one, it is a city of refugee rehabilitation.
From West Rishon, I travel to Ramleh. In 1897, Ramleh was an Arab town with a population of 6,000, known for its mosques, churches, inns, and markets. Its many hostels catered to pilgrims en route from Jaffa to Jerusalem. Today Ramleh is an unhappy Israeli city of 68,000: 50,000 Jews, 15,000 Muslims, 3,000 Christians. Almost all the descendants of the Muslim Arabs who lived here in 1897 were deported in 1948. The present-day Muslim population is made up mainly of Bedouins and Palestinians whose ancestors were transferred here from their villages in Israel’s first years.
The Jews who inherited Ramleh are mostly immigrants, of whom nearly 30 percent arrived in the 1990s and 2000s from Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Ethiopia. Many of the inhabitants of the dreary housing projects are young and poor. One third subsist on welfare benefits. On a socioeconomic scale of one to ten, Ramleh is a dismal four.
There are a few fine Palestinian houses still standing. There are several spectacular historic sites that are dilapidated and run-down. The market is lively, and there are some good ethnic restaurants around it. By the old Muslim cemetery a new mall is being built alongside a new modern quarter that is designed to attract middle-class professionals. But all in all, Ramleh is depressed and depressing. After losing its Arab identity, it never acquired a meaningful Israeli one. While Rishon LeZion gives its inhabitants the gloss of consumerism, Ramleh fails to do even that. This city never really recovered from the great cataclysm of 1948.
The Palestinians might say that when Herbert Bentwich arrived here in his Thomas Cook carriage he was carrying with him a virulent bacterium. Like the conquistadors, he wasn’t aware of it, but it devastated the Palestinian immune system and Palestinian civilization, and laid waste to old Ramleh. I would not argue, but I would add that eventually the same virulent bacterium attacked the original Zionist dream, too. In 1897 it was still possible to imagine a master plan that would turn the dream into reality, but by 1950 there was no feasibility for any such plan. Need chased need. Pressure chased pressure. Danger chased danger. The naïve conquistadors were caught up in the whirlwind of the consequences of their original deed. The historic imperative that had brought them from Europe to Ramleh wreaked a havoc that no one could control. First it demolished the indigenous culture, then it demolished t
he pioneer culture, then it uprooted the magical orange groves of my childhood and then it created faceless Israeli cities of discontent.
I climb up the 119 steps of the white tower. The panorama of coastal Israel is overwhelming. Town abuts town, neighborhood abuts neighborhood, building abuts building, apartment abuts apartment. Almost three million human beings are squeezed into the three thousand square kilometers surrounding Tel Aviv.
Perhaps there was no other way. To maintain secular Jewish existence in the modern era, we had to congregate in one place. Today, this concentration of people is not only a necessity but the essence of Israel. For it seems we Jews need to crowd together. We need to be with one another, even to fight with one another. It is as if we cannot live by ourselves as individuals, as if we are afraid that on our own we’ll vanish. So we do not acknowledge the private domain. We don’t distinguish the personal from the public. We warm ourselves against the big chill together, living communally, collectively in a kibbutz, in a moshav, in a housing estate, and in this crowded concentration of population that stretches from Hadera to Gedera and from West Rishon to East Ramleh.
From Ramleh, I travel to Lydda. The train station is still located in the same stone terminal that the French built for the Turks in 1891. Where the British-Jewish pilgrims waited for the train to Jerusalem in the spring of 1897 now stand smiling Israeli soldiers carrying Israeli-made assault rifles and holding Coke cans and chocolate bars. Two ultra-Orthodox men are fervently discussing current events. A young Russian-speaking couple argue in whispers. A beautiful young Muslim girl in tight jeans and a head scarf passes by.
From the panoramic windows of my air-conditioned train car, I look out at Ramleh, Lydda, and the Plain of Judea. East of the railroad is Tel Gezer. Here stood the ancient settlement of Gezer in 3400 B.C. Here stood a rich and powerful Canaanite city in 1700 B.C. Here stood an ancient Hebrew city in the tenth-century B.C. and a nineteenth-century Palestinian village named Abu Shusha. In 1923, great-grandfather Bentwich bought a stately home here. In 1948, the IDF’s Givati Brigade conquered the village of Abu Shusha, killing, expelling, and burning as it went. These days, on the mountain ridge south of Tel Gezer stands the Israeli community of Karmei Yosef, where Amos Yadlin and the grandchildren of Rehovot’s orange growers live a life of affluence. Theirs is Israel triumphant: lavish homes facing the ancient somber barrow.